posted at 5:55 pm on April 1, 2008 by Ed Morrissey

Dan Calabrese’s new column on Hillary Clinton’s past may bring the curtain down on her political future. Calabrese interviewed Jerry Zeifman, the man who served as chief counsel to the House Judiciary Committee during the Watergate hearings, has tried to tell the story of his former staffer’s behavior during those proceedings for years. Zeifman claims he fired Hillary for unethical behavior and that she conspired to deny Richard Nixon counsel during the hearings:

As Hillary Clinton came under increasing scrutiny for her story about facing sniper fire in Bosnia, one question that arose was whether she has engaged in a pattern of lying.

The now-retired general counsel and chief of staff of the House Judiciary Committee, who supervised Hillary when she worked on the Watergate investigation, says Hillary’s history of lies and unethical behavior goes back farther – and goes much deeper – than anyone realizes.

Jerry Zeifman, a lifelong Democrat, supervised the work of 27-year-old Hillary Rodham on the committee. Hillary got a job working on the investigation at the behest of her former law professor, Burke Marshall, who was also Sen. Ted Kennedy’s chief counsel in the Chappaquiddick affair. When the investigation was over, Zeifman fired Hillary from the committee staff and refused to give her a letter of recommendation – one of only three people who earned that dubious distinction in Zeifman’s 17-year career.

Why?

“Because she was a liar,” Zeifman said in an interview last week. “She was an unethical, dishonest lawyer. She conspired to violate the Constitution, the rules of the House, the rules of the committee and the rules of confidentiality.”

This isn’t exactly news. When her lachrymose performance arguably won her New Hampshire, Zeifman tried to tell people about Hillary’s duplicity. Patterico noticed the effort, but few others picked it up. Zeifman wrote at his website:

After hiring Hillary, Doar assigned her to confer with me regarding rules of procedure for the impeachment inquiry. At my first meeting with her I told her that Judiciary Committee Chairman Peter Rodino, House Speaker Carl Albert, Majority Leader “Tip” O’Neill, Parliamentarian Lou Deschler and I had previously all agreed that we should rely only on the then existing House Rules, and not advocate any changes. I also quoted Tip O’Neill’s statement that: “To try to change the rules now would be politically divisive. It would be like trying to change the traditional rules of baseball before a World Series.”

Hillary assured me that she had not drafted, and would not advocate, any such rules changes. However, as documented in my personal diary, I soon learned that she had lied. She had already drafted changes, and continued to advocate them. In one written legal memorandum, she advocated denying President Nixon
representation by counsel. In so doing she simply ignored the fact that in the committee’s then most recent prior impeachment proceeding, the committee had afforded the right to counsel to Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas.

I had also informed Hillary that the Douglas impeachment files were available for public inspection in the committee offices. She later removed the Douglas files without my permission and carried them to the offices of the impeachment inquiry staff — where they were no longer accessible to the public.

Hillary had also made other ethical flawed procedural recommendations, arguing that the Judiciary Committee should: not hold any hearings with – or take depositions of — any live witnesses; not conduct any original investigation of Watergate, bribery, tax evasion, or any other possible impeachable offense of President Nixon; and should rely solely on documentary evidence compiled by other committees and by the Justice Departments special Watergate prosecutor .

The right to counsel is considered one of the inviolable tenets of our justice system. It doesn’t speak well of ambitious attorneys working on a highly-charged political investigation that she wanted to deny someone the right to an attorney. Small wonder Zeifman questioned her ethics.

If all she did was to propose that as a tactic, that would not make it terribly concerning — but she did much more than just spitball ideas. When informed that public evidence showed a precedent for the right to counsel, she absconded with the files to eliminate the evidence. Does that remind anyone of later incidents in the Clinton narrative, such as the billing records for the Rose Law offices and the 900+ raw FBI files on political opponents of the Clintons?

Hillary’s advocates could accuse Zeifman of conjuring up these stories in order to draw attention to himself in the middle of a presidential campaign. However, Calabrese reports that Zeifman kept diaries during this period, urged on by friends mindful of the historical nature of the Watergate investigation. No one would have known at the time that this 27-year-old barracuda would have any sort of national significance — which makes Zeifman’s testimony all the more compelling.

We know that the Tuzla Dash covered for something much more significant in Hillary’s character. Zeifman shows that all of this forms a pattern of lies, obfuscations, deceit, and treachery. Don’t miss a word on either site.

Update: Not Senate, but the House. I changed the title to Congressional, but Zeifman worked for the House Judiciary Committee.

Breaking on Hot Air

Blowback

Note from Hot Air management: This section is for comments from Hot Air's community of registered readers. Please don't assume that Hot Air management agrees with or otherwise endorses any particular comment just because we let it stand. A reminder: Anyone who fails to comply with our terms of use may lose their posting privilege.

Comments

This looks like a nutter who is still nursing a grudge from the 1970s, maybe?

We have achieved a victory for a safer world, for our democratic values and for a stronger America…. Unnecessary conflict has been brought to a just and honorable conclusion,” said President Clinton in his address from the Oval Office on June 10.
. . . . Victory? “The decision to attack Yugoslavia [was] counterproductive, and our destruction of civilian life [is] senseless and excessively brutal,” wrote former President Jimmy Carter in a New York Times op-ed article on May 27.
. . . . “The proposed deployment to Kosovo does not deal with any threat to American security as traditionally conceived,” former secretary of state Henry Kissinger wrote in the Washington Post on Feb. 22, a month before the bombing campaign was unleashed.
. . . . There is a pattern here, and it is creating concern on both left and right. “The armed forces of the United States have participated in nondefensive, aggressive military attacks on former Yugoslavia, which have not been necessary to defend the national security of the United States,” writes Jerome Zeifman, former chief counsel for the House Watergate committee, in allegations seeking the indictment of Clinton and Secretary of Defense William Cohen for alleged war crimes and crimes against humanity. These formal legal documents have been submitted to the [U.N.-established] International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, or ICTY, at The Hague.
. . . . Obtained exclusively by Insight the proposed indictment has been transmitted to the ICTY on behalf of a new organization, the International Ethical Alliance, or IEA. Tom Warrick, deputy to the ambassador-at-large in the Office of War Crimes Issues of the Department of State, said after seeing a copy of the papers, “We think this is ridiculous. U.S. and NATO forces incorporated the laws of armed conflict in planning and carrying out their operations in Kosovo.”
. . . . Zeifman, a lifelong Democrat whose meticulous preparation of the case against Richard Nixon forced the Republican president out of the White House, is serious. And it raises concerns that, in an age of internationalism and depreciated national sovereignty, the president of the United States as well as the defense secretary could be placed in the same defendant’s box as Slobodan Milosevic, the indicted Yugoslavian war criminal.
. . . . Zeifman tells Insight the proposed indictment specifically incorporates all the charges of war crimes already pending against Milosevic and his henchmen and supplements them with the charges against Clinton and Cohen.

This would hurt Hillary in the primary in the abstract, because the Obama folks would love to add fuel to the Bosnian fire and really push the idea that Mrs. Clinton is a pathological liar (to borrow Bill Safire’s phrase from the 1990s).

But it won’t hurt Hillary in the primary because of what she was trying to do and who she was doing it to. For the aging Baby Boomer netroots out there who are among Obama’s biggest supporters, there is still a passionate, unbridled hatred for Richard M. Nixon out there from their days as Vietnam War protesters. It may not burn as brightly right now in their souls as Bush Derangement Syndrome Does, but it’s still there, and as much as they harbor hatred right now for Hillary’s failure to surrender the nomination to Obama, they are not going to take her down for a lie based on an effort to illegally deprive Richard Nixon of legal counsel.

Their Nixon hatred 35 years after the fact is still stronger than their hatred of Mrs. Clinton. Were she to get the nomination, Zeifman’s story could be a factor via the Internet in the general election, but the far left is not going to take Hillary down if it means having to defend the constitutional rights of Nixon. There are just some lines they cannot cross, even if it could make Obama’s life a lot easier.

So, was this review of his first “book” written by Publisher’s Weekly or John Dean?

Publishers Weekly: The House Judiciary Committee’s recommendation in 1974 that
Nixon be impeached was nearly thwarted by a sham congressional inquiry, according to
this blistering expose. Zeifman was chief counsel to the committee during the
impeachment inquiry… He charges that John Doar, special counsel to the inquiry,
intentionally orchestrated a charade because he feared that a thorough investigation of
the Nixon administration’s government-sponsored crimes would let out of the bag
Kennedy- era sanctioned murders carried out in the name of national security… Finally,
Zeifman maintains that Doar aide Hillary Rodham (now the First Lady) helped Doar gain
control over the investigation through unethical tricks and faulty legal opinions

John Dean: The House Judiciary Committee’s recommendation in 1974 that Nixon be
impeached was nearly thwarted by a sham congressional inquiry, according to this
blistering expose. Zeifman was chief counsel to the committee during the impeachment
inquiry… He charges that John Doar, special counsel to the inquiry, intentionally
orchestrated a charade because he feared that a thorough investigation of the Nixon
administration’s government-sponsored crimes would let out of the bag Kennedy- era
sanctioned murders carried out in the name of national security… Finally, Zeifman
maintains that Doar aide Hillary Rodham (now the First Lady) helped Doar gain control
over the investigation through unethical tricks and faulty legal opinions. Jerry Zeifman..
provides unique, often startling insights into the incomplete impeachment of Richard
Nixon. I found this book to be a real page turner… It provides missing information that
cannot be ignored by students of the period, the Nixon presidency, Watergate, and
Congress.

He charges that John Doar, special counsel to the inquiry, intentionally orchestrated a charade because he feared that a thorough investigation of the Nixon administration’s government-sponsored crimes would let out of the bag Kennedy- era sanctioned murders carried out in the name of national security… Finally, Zeifman maintains that Doar aide Hillary Rodham (now the First Lady) helped Doar gain control over the investigation through unethical tricks and faulty legal opinions

Funny how none of this is making the evening newscasts. Yet, Dan Rather was breathless over some old “documents” he’d dug up about Bush, and couldn’t wait to dedicate lots and lots of coverage on it.

Hmmm. Odd isn’t it?

Yeah… somthing tells me old Couric and company aren’t going to report on this until Fox and a few other sources really really shame them into it. Unfortunately, Hannity and OReilly are so freakin’ scared of Barack, that they can’t stop talking about Wright… who apparently is Obama’s VP or something based on all the coverage.

I also doubt that Oliver Stone will make a film about it. Now THAT would be a good film I’d pay to see.

“…that they can’t stop talking about Wright… who apparently is Obama’s VP or something…
Gartrip on April 2, 2008 at 12:07 AM

No, Wright is not Obama’s Al Gore. Someone much MORE INFLUENTIAL: his spiritual advisor- the one to whom the potential president of the U.S. would turn in times of extreme crises.

IMO, that would be akin to President Bush on 9/11 having placed a call to Fred Phelps (Westboro Baptist Church)
Obama’s not even adequate at navigating negative press; how’s he going to handle ____________ (fill in the blank)?

The right to counsel is considered one of the inviolable tenets of our justice system. It doesn’t speak well of ambitious attorneys working on a highly-charged political investigation that she wanted to deny someone the right to an attorney.

Ed, with all due respect, you’ve got this wrong. It’s George W. Bush and Dick Cheney that have been stripping us of our rights, remember? At least, that’s what wearing tinfoil hats makes one believe. Must…switch…to…wax paper.

So Jerry Ziefman has confirmed what we’ve known all along – she’s a lying shyster of a lawyer.
And I maintain she’s a old Communist but that’s my opinion. Either way the country loses if she’s elected.

Okay help me understand here. Are we discounting this stuff because the guy is a nutter? Was he a nutter when he wrote the diary, or do future bad acts taint prior evidence? Just want to get this straight, because if he’s just dimentia-ing out in his twilight years, that doesn’t burn his 30-year-old bridges.

For the sake of argument, let’s assume the story is true. To me the other interesting part of it is how desperate Teddy Kennedy and his lackeys were, and probably still are, to maintain the Camelot fantasy. JFK’s crimes and indiscretions make most of the Clinton’s pale in comparison.

Hillary was doing Teddy’s bidding, with Burke Marshall (her former Yale prof) as intermediary. It must really gall her to have him repay her “indiscretions” in the Watergate investigation by endorsing Obama.

OK, whether he’s crazy or not now, these charges are still old news. I understand they’re laid out in David Brock’s 1990s bio The Seduction of Hillary Rodham, with citations to Zeifman. The story never got any traction then either.

The MSM is going to keep the story buried, though I have doubts it would make any difference if it were otherwise. Aging liberal boomers still nurse a Nixon-hatred that approaches modern BDS, and I doubt many of them would care about this story if they even knew about it — after all, Nixon wasn’t a foreign terrorist, so I guess he wasn’t deserving of the full protections of the legal system.

And even if Democrats might be otherwise disposed to care about this story, for someone to tell the truth about a Democrat’s past behavior apparently constitutes “swift-boating,” and is grounds for huffy indignant denunciation.

I don’t think the story’s all that huge, really — just like the Kuzla story. With Rodham, these are “dog bites man” stories, which fit perfectly with what many of know about her nature. What would be a blockbuster story would be Rodham telling the truth about something that didn’t reflect well on her.

I don’t think the story’s all that huge, really — just like the Kuzla story.

Yeah, but the Kuzla story is big because there’s visual evidence that directly contradicts her. No, it doesn’t tell you anything you didn’t already know, if you’ve been paying attention, but the image of her standing there telling a whopper and then flashing back 12 years to what really happened, that’s powerful.

Recall: CLINTON used the FEDS to attack the Branch Davidians of Mt.Carmel, TX outside of Waco whose crime was being accused by the CLINTON’S of having weapons and practicing polygamy perhaps. NOTHING WAS PROVEN except that the Clintons could murder everyone in cold blood and provide the MSM propaganda story that we all swallowed in order to disassociate ourselves from what just happened. Women and children were bombed and burnt to death alongside their men outside of Waco, TX without public outcry, opening the door to do whatever Clinton wanted without domestic reprisal. Bombing Bosnia was wrong as USA/NATO attacked CIVILIANS with the most advanced weaponry save nuclear.

Moxie, for some reason that photo reminds me of the character Madame Defarge in Dicken’s “A Tale of Two Cities”. During the Reign of Terror, every day Madame Defarge would come and sit by the execution platform, knitting…and getting off watching each execution by the Guillotine.